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| Research shows that gossiping is an effective way of warding off competition |
By GARDY CHACHA
gchacha@standardmedia.co.ke
The thought that women love gossiping is entrenched in many minds.
In fact, the notion is that stay at home mothers group together to engage in chit-chats about everything and nothing just for the fun of it.
One Canadian expert, Dr Tracy Vaillancourt of the University of Ottawa has written in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B that females have a tendency to use gossiping to shoo off attractive and sexually available peers who can catch the eye of a man they are involved with or one she has a crush on.
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According to Vailancourt, gossiping negatively about potential competition is an ‘effective approach’ used by many women and girls at the peak of their reproductive stage.
In one experiment, young women were randomly paired to either an attractive female dressed in sexy clothing or one dressed in a conservative manner.
Video recordings showed – with the exception of two women – all of the participants who engaged in indirect aggression had been assigned to a woman deemed sexy and attractive by world standards.
Cheekily, the form of aggression the women employ is indirect aggression (gossip) to fend off the threat.
This is because it poses minimal risk of physical danger to her.
The aggressor can also make it appear as if there was ‘no intention to hurt at all.’
The victimisation of another woman increases in relation to mating motives.
At the end of the day, the ‘snobbish’ criticism on a potential threat is not meant to escalate into physical confrontation: it is more important that the aggressor stays alive so that she haves her mate for herself.
The use of indirect aggression increases with age, according to Vaillancourt’s hypothesis, and is used at a similar rate during adolescence and young adulthood.
The expert told an online publication that: “females suppress the sexuality of other females by using informal sanctions such as ostracism and derogatory gossip.”
In her publication, Dr Vaillancourt demonstrates that the other ‘sexy’ woman is perceived as a sexual rival.
None of the women in the experiment was fine with allowing her boyfriend spending time alone with the vixen.
